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Letter of Support for the "If You Like Your Health Plan, You Can Keep It" Act, S. 1617

As one of our millions of FreedomWorks members nationwide, I urge you to contact your senators today and urge them to support S. 1617, the “If You Like Your Health Plan, You Can Keep It Act”. Sponsored by Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), this bill would make health insurance plans sold before January 1st, 2014 immune to the new coverage requirements under ObamaCare.

ObamaCare was written with restrictions on what coverage insurance plans must offer, such that the law’s result could not be anything other than causing millions of Americans’ health insurance policies to become illegal overnight, on January 1st, 2014. Now, with the renewal season for insurance policies in full swing, the inevitable is happening – hundreds of thousands of people have already received their letters from insurers, informing them that their chosen policies will not be available for next year. Millions more of these letters are on their way.

As recently as last week, President Obama himself repeated variations on his favorite fabrication – that “if you like your plan, you can keep it.” Now the President has suddenly admitted this to be a falsehood and apologized, but his real or feigned remorse does not help the vast number of people who now face having to buy a new (and, in many cases, much more expensive) plan in 2014.

Senator Johnson’s bill attempts to stem the tide of these dropped insurance plans by allowing any plans being sold by December 31st, 2013 to be “grandfathered” under ObamaCare, without the coverage restrictions that rendered so many of them illegal under the new law. The bill also allows family members of those already insured and new employees of companies with preexisting insurance plans to sign up for these “grandfathered” plans.

Stopping people from losing their existing insurance is only a temporary patch on the road to saving America from ObamaCare, by delaying, defunding, and dismantling it. But it is a good first step to saving Americans from ObamaCare’s broken promises.

I urge you to contact your senators today and urge them to support S. 1617, the “If You Like Your Health Plan, You Can Keep It Act”, to stop millions of Americans who already have insurance from losing the plan that they have already chosen for themselves.

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Just as "the devil is in the details" ... that's where Angels hide as well. The only way to really let people keep their existing plans is to repeal the mandates on minimum coverage. If insurers can offer what the Democrats have been trying to portray as "substandard" insurance policies, the Obamacare mandated options will disappear rapidly because they won't be able to compete for more than a small fraction of customers. But then what? Whether Obamacare works or not is not the central issue. The central issue is; This engages the federal government in actions it is not Constitutionally authorized to engage in and it renders Americans as inferior to the federal government. I won't oppose such "fixes" as Senate 1617. But fixes for secondary problems that leave the greater problem intact aren't really fixes. I don't see in this proposal a "poison pill" that will eventually undo the greatest harm that Obamacare has done. If it's there ... educate me. It looks to me like this is "Big Government is fine as long as the right people are running it."

There are two bills in the House: H.R. 3406 & H.R. 3350. H.R. 3350 is coming up for a vote in the House this Friday, 11/15, but H.R. 3406 is the bill which Senator Johnson has associated with S. 1617. This is a little confusing; while my House Rep Cory Gardner is a Cosponsor of H.R. 3350, his office couldn't tell me why there are two bills and Gardner is not a Cosponsor of H.R. 3406.
It will be most interesting to see how the Senate handles this.

Following the news the UnitedHealth Group, the largest insurance company in the United States, is scaling back its ObamaCare marketing and considering withdrawing from the exchanges, FreedomWorks CEO Adam Brandon commented:

The irreparable structural flaws of ObamaCare are being revealed at a frightening pace. 12 of the state insurance co-ops have failed, insurance premiums just keep rising, enrollment is predicted to be flat, the majority of newly insured Americans have actually just been shoved into Medicaid, and the insurance companies are asking for billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts to forestall even steeper price hikes. ObamaCare is dismantling and destabilizing the entire infrastructure of our health care system, and it’s hurting real people.

The House of Representatives’ ObamaCare reconciliation bill doesn’t go far enough. The Senate now has the opportunity to improve upon it by sending legislation that fully repeals ObamaCare to the president’s desk. Unfortunately, some Senate Republicans are content to go along with the House’s timid piecemeal approach.

Last week, I wrote about how insurance companies are receiving only a fraction of the money they asked for to compensate them for losses under the Affordable Care Act, and how this was a consequence of structural weaknesses in the design of the law. Now, analysts from ratings firm Standard and Poor's are saying that the risk corridor fund charged with providing this money is nearly exhausted, and that congressional action will likely be required to refill it sometime next year.

Ever since home brewing was legalized in the late 1970s, the craft beer industry has become one of America's most vibrant examples of entrepreneurship and small business. It doesn't take much more than some barley, some hops, and a dream to start your own private microbrewery, and if you're good at it, you could become a nationally recognized brand.

An old rhetorical question asks: "If social Security is such a great deal, why is it mandatory?" A topically apt paraphrase of this would be: "if ObamaCare is so good for health care, why is the president still struggling to sell it five years after it became law?" What does it say about a policy that people refuse to take advantage of - and I use the word "advantage" very loosely - without significant arm twisting? Even though it has been made flat out illegal not to purchase health insurance, millions of people are still staying far, far away from ObamaCare's insurance exchanges, because they know that the legal penalty will actually be less painful than participating in the government-controlled health insurance market.

It's always a good idea to look at the incentive structure behind any public policy. Analyzing how people are induced to behave, and the consequences of those behaviors, is a pretty good indication of whether a plan will succeed or fail. ObamaCare is too vast an example to take all at once, but new information sheds light on a particular piece of the health care law is contributing to the skyrocketing price of insurance.

Much of the recent news covering the failures of ObamaCare have focused on the collapse of the nonprofit cooperatives authorized by the law. Just last week, for example, Utah's cooperative became the tenth to fail. Billions of taxpayer dollars were spent to get these insurance cooperatives off the ground, a compromise for Democrats who wanted a single-payer option, and they have proven to be unsustainable. But another failure of the law is rising insurance premiums on the individual health insurance market.

Once upon a time, ObamaCare created 23 non-profit health insurance co-ops that were supposed to increase coverage while reducing costs. Doesn't that sound nice? Well, this is a good time to keep in mind the old saying "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."